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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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The post YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What it means for Jews when Trump administration officials misquote the Bible
(JTA) — The Bible is back in the news.
In a Pentagon prayer service on April 15, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth quoted what was seemingly meant to be a verse from the ancient Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, but was in fact from the Gospel of Tarantino, as Stephen Colbert quipped.
In response, Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesman, released a statement on X noting that the homage to the auteur’s 1994 film “Pulp Fiction” was intentional. Hegseth had “shared a custom prayer … which was obviously inspired by dialogue in ‘Pulp Fiction.’”
Two days later, the New York Times suggested that President Donald Trump was likely participating in “America Reads the Bible,” a marathon reading of scripture to take place in Washington, D.C.’s Museum of the Bible, as a means to repair his relationship with Catholics after he publicly sparred with the pope over the Iran war and deleted a tweet depicting himself as Jesus Christ.
“President Trump has a complicated relationship with the Bible,” the paper noted. “He has often called it his favorite book, has posed with it for photographers outside a church and has sold his own edition for $60. But he has also struggled to name a favorite passage or even pick a favorite Testament between the two.”
At the event on April 21, Trump read a passage from 2 Chronicles, in which God promises to heal the land if its people “humble themselves, pray, and seek My favor.”
As a scholar specializing in the influence of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish ideas on American history, I can attest that the habit of American leaders citing chapter and verse (accurate or not) is as old as the United States itself. In fact, it dates back to the Pilgrims. It has been a powerful and effective means of cultivating covenantal community. Americans who cited scripture have forged a country unique in world history in the religious freedom it has offered to all its citizens, not the least of which to us Jews, the original biblically bound people.
The America ethos of fighting for freedom and liberty, drawn from the story of the Children of Israel millennia ago, to this day shapes how the United States operates both internally and on the world stage.
Reflecting on the harsh and uncertain early days of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, who signed the Mayflower Compact and would serve as the territory’s governor for roughly three decades, paraphrased the Exodus story and Moses’ final speech in Deuteronomy. Arriving in the New World, he said, his fellow Pilgrims could only see:
a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men — and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects.
In the first half of this excerpt from his journal, Bradford was alluding to the Israelites’ escape from Egypt into the rough wilderness in which they would wander for 40 years. And then he referenced the mountaintop on the precipice of the Promised Land, Pisgah, on which Moses stood as his people were about to complete their arduous journey as described in the last of the Five Books of Moses. To Bradford, scripture was a source of strength and solace during communally challenging times.
Ten years later, the Puritan leader John Winthrop would describe in similarly Hebraic lens how if Massachusetts Bay Colony’s residents will do right in the eyes of the Lord, “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies… For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
Winthrop was misquoting of Leviticus 26:8: “Five of you shall give chase to a hundred, and a hundred of you shall give chase to ten thousand.” However, the details were less important than the sense of divine mission that was powering the Pilgrims’ and the Puritan’s project.
Later, the American Founders also possessed a powerful attachment to the Bible, even if the details were sometimes hazy.
John Adams, in 1776, after hearing a sermon paralleling the Patriot cause to Israel’s fight against Pharaoh’s tyranny, ruminated: “Is it not a Saying of Moses, ‘who am I, that I should go in and out before this great People’?” It actually was not a saying of Moses. Adams was conflating Moses’ “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh…” speech in Exodus 3:11 with a a request by a much later Jewish ruler, King Solomon that God “give me now wisdom and knowledge to go out and come in before this people” (2 Chronicles 1:10).
A year earlier, the equally-enamored-with-
Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the country’s most biblically literate president ever, often weaved scripture into his seminal addresses, from “four score and seven years ago,” which was likely borrowed from a rabbinic sermon citing a verse in Psalms, to a purposeful paraphrase of Exodus 19:5 when, on Feb. 21, 1861, he referred to Americans writ large as the Lord’s “almost chosen people.”
It hasn’t only been political leaders, of course, who rephrase the Word in an effort to encourage Americans to live up to their highest ideals. Martin Luther King Jr. made reference to that same mountaintop as Bradford in the civil rights leader’s final speech on April 3, 1968 in Memphis. He rousingly reassured his audience that:
We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop… I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
Citing (and mis-citing) scripture, then, is a longstanding and worthy American tradition.
Some Jews might feel excluded by Jesus and New Testament texts being invoked in a nonsectarian context by public leaders, and verses can be abused as opposed to correctly interpreted. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of looking to the Bible to shape the soul of America has served a largely positive purpose. A religious civic space is full of happier, healthier people who give more charity, have more children and forge a strong sense of community.
Regardless of one’s party or views on those in power today, then, quoting the Bible in the American public sphere has long characterized the American experiment. On the whole, it has been largely good for the American collective character and good for the Jews. Occasionally, these quotes might be imperfect, but they reflect a worthy national will: the desire to see through the long march towards liberty and justice for all.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post What it means for Jews when Trump administration officials misquote the Bible appeared first on The Forward.
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Recalling Yeva Beider, devoted widow of the writer Chaim Beider
דעם 6טן אַפּריל 2026 האָט אין ברוקלין זיך געפֿעלט יעוואַ לאָזדערניק־ביידער ע״ה אין עלטער פון 103 יאָר. זי איז צום בעסטן באַקאַנט אין דער ייִדיש־וועלט צוליב איר אָפּגעגעבנקייט איר מאַן, דעם פֿאַרשטאָבענעם שרײַבער, פּאָעט און רעדאַקטאָר חיים ביידער ע״ה.
זינט חיים ביידערס טויט אין 2003 האָט יעוואַ זיך אָפּגעגעבן מיטן אָפּהיטן זײַן ליטעראַרישע ירושה ובפֿרט דורכן העלפֿן אַרויסגעבן זײַן לעקסיקאָן פֿון די ייִדישע שרײַבער אין ראַטן־פֿאַרבאַנד, רעדאַקטירט דורך באָריס סאַנדלער און גענאַדי עסטרײַך. דאָס איז אַ וויכטיקער צוגאָב צום לעקסיקאָן פֿון דער מאָדערנער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור, ווי אויך צו דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור־פֿאָרשונג בכלל.
דורך אַ שמועס מיט איר זון מאַטוויי, האָב איך זיך דערוווּסט אַז יעוואַ לאָזדערניק איז געבוירן געוואָרן דעם 27סטן נאָוועמבער 1922 אין שטעטל וואָלאָטשיסק, מערבֿ־אוקראַיִנע, בײַם טײַך זברוטש. די צווייטע וועלט־מלחמה האָט זי איבערגעלעבט אין סאָוועטן־רוסלאַנד און אין 1946 האָט זי חתונה געהאַט מיט באָריס שפּיזעלן, וואָס האָט אָנגעפֿירט מיטן פֿינאַנץ־אָפּטייל פון דער גובערניע. יעווא האָט אויך געאַרבעט פֿאַר דער גובערניע־רעגירונג.
מיט שפּיזעלן האָט זי געהאַט צוויי זין, מאַטוויי און איסאַק. ווען דער עלטערער זון, מאַטוויי, איז געבוירן געוואָרן, האָבן זיי אים געמאַכט א ברית און צוליב דעם האָבן ביידע אָנגעוווירן זייערע שטעלעס בײַ דער רעגירונג, ווי אויך זייער דירה. שפּיזעל האָט באַקומען אַרבעט אין אַ כעמיע־פֿאַבריק. אין 1967 איז ער אַוועק אין דער אייביקייט.
אין 1978 האָט יעוואַ חתונה געהאַט מיט חיים ביידערן און צוזאַמען האָבן זיי עולה געווען אין 1996. אין זעלביקן יאָר האָט דער פֿאָרווערטס, צוזאַמען מיט אַנדערע ייִדישע קולטור־אָרגאַניזאַציעס, זיי פֿאַרבעטן אין די פֿאַראייניקטע שטאַטן, וווּ זיי זענען פֿאַרבליבן. ביידער איז נפֿטר געוואָרן אין 2003.
ווען איך האָב באַקומען די טרויעריקע בשׂורה וועגן יעוואַס פּטירה זענען מיר געקומען אויפֿן געדאַנק אַ שלל מיט זכרונות. ווער ס׳האָט זיך פֿאַרנומען מיט ייִדיש אין שטאָט ניו־יאָרק במשך פֿון די שפּעט-90ער יאָרן פֿונעם פֿאָריקן יאָרהונדערט, און פֿרי אינעם ערשטן יאָרצענדלינג פֿון איצטיקן, וועט קיין מאָל ניט פֿאַרגעסן אָט דאָס פּאָרל ייִדישיסטן: ער, דער שטילער, מיט די דיקע ברילן און ווײַסע, צעשויבערטע האָר פֿון אַן אינטעלעקטואַל, און זי — לעבעדיק און באַרעדעוודיק.
זי איז געווען זײַן פֿאַרוואַלטערין, קען מען זאָגן. זי האָט געפֿירט זײַן צײַטפּלאַן, געזען אַז ער זאָל עסן באַצײַטנס, און תּמיד מיטגעבראַכט עסן מיט זיך, כּדי מיטצוטיילן מיט אַנדערע: אַ פּעקל זיסוואַרג, אַ האָניק־לעקעך אַ מתּנה אויף יום־טובֿ, צי וואָס ניט איז. זי האָט געקענט גוט דערציילן אַ וויץ און האָט שיין געפֿירט די שטוב.
איין מאָל בין איך געווען בײַ איר אָפּנעמען אַרכיוואַלע מאַטעריאַלן ביידערס און זי האָט מיר דערלאַנגט אַ פּסחדיקן מיטאָג: איר ספּעציעלן טאָג־טעגלעכן סאַלאַט ֹ— שאַלאַטן מיט פּאָמידאָר און אוגערקע, אַלץ צעשניטן און באַשאָטן מיט אַ ביסל זאַלץ און געלאָזן שטיין אַ נאַכט אין פֿרידזשידעיר. ס׳האָט געהאַט אַזאַ פֿרישן טעם… און דערצו איבערגעוואַרעמטע כרעמזלעך אַליין־געמאַכטע.
אַז איך האָב דאָס איין מאָל דערציילט דער ייִדיש־ליטעראַטור־פֿאָשערין שבֿע צוקער האָט זי מיר גלײַך איבערגעגעבן אייגענע זכרונות — וועגן יעוואַ ביידערס יויך. זי און דער היסטאָריקער דוד פֿישמאַן זענען ביידע געווען בײַ די ביידערס אין שטוב אין מאָסקווע, האָט יעוואַ זיי דערלאַנגט אַ יויך צום טיש וואָס, זאָגט שבֿע, „איז געווען איינס אויף דער וועלט.“ איין מאָל איז שבֿע געפֿאָרן אין אַן אויטאָ מיטן ייִדישן קולטור־טוער גרשון ווײַנער ז״ל און אַנדערע, ווען עמעצער האָט דערמאָנט דעם נאָמען „יעוואַ ביידער“. אַלע האָבן תּיכּף געלויבט איר יויך און מסכּים געווען אַז ס׳איז טעם גן־עדן.
יעוואַ האָט אויך געהאַט אויסערגעוויינטלעכע זכרונות צו דערציילן פֿון איר לעבן. זי איז למשל אַ מאָל געווען אויף אַ חתונה, וואָס מע האָט געפּראַוועט אויף ביידע זײַטן פֿון טײַך זברוטש: די מחותּנים און גוטע־פֿרײַנד האָבן געוואָרפֿן מיט „מזל־טובֿס“ און פּעקלעך עסנוואַרג איבערן טײַך. אין 2012 האָט דער ניו־יאָרקער רוסיש־שפּראַכיקער פֿאַרלאַג „ליבערטי פּאָבלישינג האַוס“ פֿאַרעפֿנטלעכט אירע זכרונות אונטערן טיטל „אימענאַ נעזאַבוועניע“ (אומפֿאַרגעסלעכע נעמען).
יעוואַ איז געווען אַ ליבער מענטש און ליב געהאַט די ייִדישע קולטור. זי וועט אונדז שטאַרק אויספֿעלן.
The post Recalling Yeva Beider, devoted widow of the writer Chaim Beider appeared first on The Forward.
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2 Jewish men stabbed in London, in attack British PM Keir Starmer calls ‘utterly appalling’
(JTA) — Two Jewish men were stabbed on the street in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood of London on Wednesday, escalating anxieties amid ongoing incidents targeting local Jews that police say reflect Iranian involvement.
A man was arrested at the scene in Golders Green after being apprehended first by members of the Shomrim, a Jewish security force that operates in parts of London. Hatzola, the Jewish-operated nonprofit emergency service whose ambulances were recently burned in an arson, treated the two victims.
“One male was seen running along Golders Green Road armed with a knife and attempting to stab Jewish members of the public. Shomrim responded immediately and detained the suspect. Police attended and deployed a taser,” Shomrim said in a post to social media.
Both men who were stabbed — one in his 70s and the other in his 30s — are hospitalized in stable condition, according to the Metropolitan Police.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the attack, calling it antisemitic and praising the nonprofit services that responded.
“The antisemitic attack in Golders Green is utterly appalling. Attacks on our Jewish community are attacks on Britain,” he said on X. “Thank you to Shomrim, Hatzola and the police for acting swiftly. Those responsible will be brought to justice.”
The incident comes amid a series of attacks on Jewish institutions, and arrests of people who allegedly staged them or otherwise are accused of posing threats to the London Jewish community. No one had previously been injured in the incidents, which have included multiple arson attacks on local synagogues and, on Tuesday, a fire at a memorial in Golders Green for those murdered by the Iranian regime. Police have arrested dozens of people in recent weeks and have said they see evidence that Iran may be paying locals to stoke violence against Jews.
The Metropolitan Police said they were working to identify the nationality and background of the attacker in Golders Green, who they said was 45 and had attempted to stab officers to responded to the scene. They also acknowledged that the current situation is alarming to Jews in London.
“We are aware of the significant distress and concern this incident is likely to cause in the face of a number of incidents in the local area,” Deputy Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, who leads policing in the area, said in a statement. “A suspect is in custody, and investigators are considering all possible motives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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